Willing to serve his country, he joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, which had over 30,000 men under its command. He would go on to illustrate for other British railway companies till World War I had broken out in 1914. During this time, he also pursued his interests to know more about the oceans and anything maritime.īecause of these passions of his, he was a resident illustrator for The Illustrated London News and the Illustrated Mail in 1898.
His illustration career started as a youngster when he had attended the Southsea School of Art. Wilkinson, a native of Cambridge, was a painter at heart and by profession. Norman Wilkinson Norman Wilkinson painting a nautical-themed piece (Robert Perera Fine Art) They were also equipped with talented painters, one being Norman Wilkinson. Luckily, the allies were not just brilliant military strategists. With hundreds of allied naval ships destroyed by the central powers, changes had to be made with their navigation systems and, of course, the paint of their fleets. So much so, water is highly unpredictable as its colors can change whenever it is sunset, sunrise, or whenever there is a change in weather. However, as all people in the Navy know, water from different oceans, densities, and at different times of day widely change.
The notorious German U-boats, at that time, were innovative and strong additions to the Imperial German Navy’s naval arsenal that sunk thousands of allied navy warships.īefore the idea of using the dazzled camouflage pattern for ships, the allied forces simply painted their fleets in varying shades of blue and blue-gray to mimic the colors of the waters. “It was used in combination with tactics such as zig-zagging and traveling in convoys, in which the most vulnerable ships were kept in the center of the formation, surrounded by faster, more dangerous ships capable of destroying submarines.” The synergy of those measures was “wonderfully effective,” he says.Remember those vividly colored patterns they used to paint on ships and, to a lesser extent, on aircraft too? Wasn’t it counterproductive to razzle-dazzle a ship when the enemy can easily spot you in open waters? Solving A Colorful Camouflage Problemĭuring the first World War, naval forces had the problem of disguising their fleet in the open waters as they were simply too vulnerable to enemy ships. “It’s important to remember that ships didn’t just rely upon dazzle camouflage for protection from U-boats,” Behrens explains. "None of the camouflaged fighting ships were sunk,” he says Ninety six ships over 2,500 tons were sunk of these only 18 were camouflaged and all of them were merchant ships. A total of 1,256 merchant and fighting ships, were camouflaged between March 1 and November 11, 1918. “When the US Navy adopted Wilkinson's scheme for both merchant and fighting ships there is statistical evidence to support Wilkinson's technique,” Forbes says.
As Forbes explains, a postwar commission concluded that it probably only provided a slight advantage. How successful dazzle actually was in thwarting U-boat attacks isn’t clear. Roosevelt, and then helped to set up a camouflage unit headed by American impressionist painter Everett Warner.īy the end of the war, more than 2,300 British ships had been decorated with dazzle camouflage. government, Wilkinson sailed across the Atlantic in March 1918 and met with Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. But it had occurred to him that if a black ship was broken up with white stripes it would visually confuse the enemy.Īt the request of the U.S. “I knew it was utterly impossible to render a ship invisible,” Wilkinson later recalled, according to Forbes’ book. When he returned to the Royal Navy’s Devonport dockyard, he went straight to his superior officer with his idea. “For Wilkinson to come up with the ideas of redefining camouflage as high visibility as opposed to low visibility was pretty astonishing.”Īs Peter Forbes writes in his 2009 book Dazzled and Deceived: Mimicry and Camouflage, Wilkinson-who commanded an 80-foot motorboat used for minesweeping off the British coast-apparently was inspired during a weekend fishing trip in the Spring of 1917. Behrens, a professor of art and Distinguished Scholar at the University of Northern Iowa, who writes “Camoupedia,” a blog that’s a compendium of research on the art of camouflage. Dazzle camouflage, as Wilkinson’s concept came to be called, “appeared to be counter-intuitive,” explains Roy R.